Instructional Design Live

Instructional Design Live is based around Instructional Design related topics and is opportunity for Instructional Designers and professionals engaged in similar work to discuss effective online teaching and learning practices.

Time to put a little fun into online learning--with good reason: 'Emotional arousal helps the brain learn'. Medina, Brain Rules (2008). Joni Dunlap leads the IDLive team in considering how to incorporate fun into the fabric of a course to provide a more stimulating learning experience.

Zuochen Zhang, Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Windsor University, and Richard F. Kenny, Associate Professor at the Center for Distance Education, Athabasca University, joined us this week to discuss the perspectives of International students in online courses.

Susan Ko, Executive Director of the Center of Teaching Excellence at University of Maryland University College, published the first edition of Teaching Online: A Practical Guide 10 years ago. The third edition, published this year, reflects a number of changes that have happened in the field over that last several years such as the: Web 2.0 revolution, growing acceptance of online education, need for special training and continuing support for faculty and students, team course development, growth of open educational resources, and increasing use of mobile devices.

With unassuming clarity, Susan addresses a number of key issues facing designers and faculty in higher (and K-12) education today.

Inspired by a number of discussions at the Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning in Madison Wisconsin, we consider the process of transitioning from a proprietary learning management system such as Blackboard to an open source system such as Moodle.

In May 2009, the US Department of Education issued a meta-analysis and review of online learning studies that compared face-to-face, blended and online delivery modes, and found that: “On average, students in online learningconditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” Despite the caveats identified in the research, the conclusion, for some, was still: Online learning is better!Shanna Smith-Jaggars, Senior Research Associate at the Community Colleges Research Center challenges this assertion in her response to the meta-analysis (July 2010). Jaggars more fully explores the comparison of online and face-to-face instruction and finds only 7 studies out of 51 can be used to shed light on this question. Of these 7, Jaggars concludes that there is no significant difference between learning outcome achievement in face-to-face or online courses for certain student populations. Sound familiar? Time to channel our energies into more rewarding directions, perhaps.. As Jaggars puts it in this interesting interview, “what we really need to be doing is spending more time and effort in trying to figure out what are the most effective instructional practices in both modalities”

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Paul Allison

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